Sunday, May 31, 2015

The following post was prompted by the New York Times article linked below.

It just continues to mystify me, as well as break my heart, how some of us can so easily acquire material gain via the suffering of others. More to the point, however, is the fact that it is still you and I who allow the environment that fosters this kind of behavior to continue. An environment that is a hothouse for the encouragement of greed and usury. She shame is ours as well as for those more directly involved.

The following post was prompted by the Washington Post article linked below.

These statistics collected by the Census Bureau show that over 60% of assistance recipients use it for less than a year, and the makeup of that population represents a cross section of demographics.

What would be interesting now would be to have the contrast of seeing a similar study done on corporate welfare; all of the direct subsidies, investment incentives, and tax breaks they pay campaigns for, bully all levels of government for, and withhold jobs to threaten the citizenry for. Perhaps there we might find some truth to the myth of the permanently dependent.

Saturday, May 30, 2015

The following post was prompted by the Daily Beast article linked below.

The "Sunset" provisions in the Patriot Act are set to bring its over reaching usurpations of our rights to an end. To which I can only say good riddance. Let us just hope that the congressional proclivities suggested in this article hold true.

I have always held the belief that you don't fight an idea, or another way of living, by becoming less of what is most dear in what is aspired to within your idea, or way of life. What you do, rather, is live those ideals boldly, with as few exceptions as possible; knowing full well that people you care about may suffer, and/or die. That's the whole point of what sacrifice is for something you believe is just as precious as life itself.

Becoming less of what we aspire to as a response to terrorists is simply to keep the initiative in their hands. Showing them that no matter how many of us they might kill, we will just carry on with living the better life that what we aspire to allows us. Not only does this take away any remaining moral ambiguity there might be, it lays bare the horrible truth of their violence and the contrast of that with the poverty and suffering of their own people as they pursue it rather than addressing these needs.

A part of this, of course, is realizing that what we aspire to, in addition to personal liberty, in combination with personal responsibility, balancing the needs of the individual with the needs of the community as a whole, also rejects the injustice of greed, and the tyranny of concentrated power that comes from it.

Too many things have been done in our name to benefit a few. And the primary reason this has come about, and why it remains so, is that Capitalism continues to be our economic operating system. The very system whose very foundation lies upon the "economics of scarcity," as well as the notion that "greed is good."

What is private. What is property. What is commodity, not to mention, what the free flow of information means to the ability of a truly free people to make well informed choices, all become something quite problematic in a system where scarcity, and the control of where, when and how such scarcity is applied, is a virtually certain way of making sure that injustice will always have the upper hand.

You better start thinking seriously about this because the next legislation with a euphemistic title that does things exactly opposite to our ideals will have our nation going down a path to do things at least as terrifying, and destructive, as anything those religious zealots have in mind.

Friday, May 29, 2015

The following post was prompted by the citylab.com article linked below.

Here again is where having a larger context provides the contrast necessary to give more useful meaning to everyday developments.

The state by state charting of the wage one would need to be able to afford a 2 bedroom apartment is quite telling. If only we could juxtapose this with the cost of feeding 2 or three people as well in these terms.

And the really amazing part, for me at least, is that for Capitalism to truly survive as a commodity/consumerist form of operating system, a good deal more than $20 an hour would be required. After all, how else would the ever increasing lower than middle class be able to afford to buy what this insane making monster puts out?

As I've indicated before, I find it quite unlikely that having the robots somehow take up the purchasing slack will provide an effective solution. And yet this marginal group at the top of the power pyramid still thinks that big profit margins, and continual cost cost cutting can go on for ever. What unbelievable stupidity. And its taking us all towards the same precipice.

Thursday, May 28, 2015

When you talk about India, and its desire to become a fully developed nation, you are really talking about all of the under developed nations. All of them share this desire to move themselves out of the dark ages in terms of the living conditions their lack of modern infrastructure leaves them in currently. And what could be a more human desire than that.

This is why the already developed nations must take the lead in creating the new pathways to becoming a fully developed nation. Pathways that would obviate the reliance of such carbon heavy fuels as coal.
And what better way to do that than launching the worlds first global public power utility.

This has always been my dream when I was thinking of how to truly integrate a sea based, Tornado Turbine powered, hydrogen fuel stream into the world economy. And it is only the Western World that can lead the way on this.

We must make the resource allocations necessary to make this stream infrastructure a reality. And by that I mean an across the board approach to how the platforms are created, with the right materials used (as in hemp as a new world cash crop), as well as in how we distribute it, and the innovative ways we make it affordable to those with least ability to pay for it.

If we truly believe in making things right with the planet's ecosystem this is the only equitable way to go about it that I can think of.

The following post was prompted by the medium.com article linked below.

This article is actually further information on the bust I linked to here ("Banks getting caught in criminal transaction schemes").

The main thrust of this new article is how little what could have been used as punishment actually was. It's disgusting to say the least, but it certainly does serve to remind us of how the "inequality of outcomes" works in practical terms.

The following post was prompted by the fasctcoexist.com article linked below.

Decades later, after a grand parade of tax breaks, incentivizing, and playing the states against each other for the best deal on regulation, as well as taxes, we have this supposedly new idea for an investment fund for cities still "economically challenged."

As the article states, there is a lot of untapped capital sloshing around the world looking for investment opportunities. Why not create a new kind of venture capital fund to channel that money to these "e. c." hot spots; with, of course, more incentivizing to make it worth the while of said overly cashed investors.

The poor dears. What's a well fattened fat cat to do when so much of what might ordinarily be an investment has so many uncertainties. You know, those pesky little details that all revolve around... Dare we even say it? Risk!

So much global instability. So many new potential regulation costs. And lets not even talk about the competition that overseas producers of what ever can throw into the mix. One could almost swoon for the days when interest rates made Certificates of Deposit so attractive; making money just by having it sitting there. Gosh...

One can only wonder how such people cannot even begin to see why cities can wither precisely because no one wants to take responsibility for keeping current infrastructure going, let alone investing in the latest tech to make it on par with the rest of the world. That they have these vast new gluts of cash precisely because they've been able to dodge such responsibilities.

Somebody call Vanna White because these folks desperately need to buy a clue.

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

The following post was prompted by the Center For Public Integrity article linked below.

The interesting thing about store fronts like this is that hardly anyone who makes use of its services ever actually goes there. You could be media ambushed, or protested publicly, if you actually went there. Even if your money didn't actually excuse you from having to make personal appearances much of anywhere (or to be held personally responsible).

No, this is a physical place only for the necessity of having an address, and to apply a legally applicable reference point for some of your filings.

And just because this particular one represents so called "conservative" economic and religious concerns, don't be fooled into thinking so called "Liberals" don't have them as well. A Liberal is simply a diluted conservative who wants to keep most of money's benefits while keeping their conscience at bay with a mix of contributions, and lip service, to social concerns.

It is, for me at least, an interesting contrast to see such a benign little edifice from which so much translative power can, in a sense, flow through. But then again, a low profile, and as much subtlety as possible, are what keep the hands on the levers of power both anonymous and wreathed in velvet.

The following post was prompted by the New York Times Op-Ed piece linked below.

Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman give a fairly comprehensive description of what they call the "New Dictators" currently in power in several countries now. The techniques now employed resort to violence only occasionally, and with a good deal more precision. And though they make passing reference to the fact that the Western Democracies are hardly perfect, they don't really delve into what are the parallels between what their "New Dictators" do and what the more dispersed collective of "Big Money" does.

Most of their list is there; co-option, media control, and even violence, though there it is usually quite a bit more indirect; suddenly pulling the rug out from under people economically, denying health care, or putting poison emitters adjacent to the marginalized, which is violence used as an example of what happens to those who don't play along.

You should really keep this sort of thing in mind when you look down upon those obvious dictators with anything approaching comforted reproach. Doing business as usual in a money control democracy is letting a velvet hand of another kind jerk you off to your detriment. And it is most certainly not sustainable.

Following my most recent privacy post, and subsequent update, this article, covering the new activities of PGP founder Philip Zimmermann, felt like a very good follow on to the various concerns that surround the privacy debate.

As you continue to delve into the many facets of this issue I would hope that you keep in mind the contribution that our current economic operating model provides. Information as both commodity and currency insures that it will be horded by some, but allowed to be accessible by the very same folks as long as it is not their information; which in my view is the real crux of the matter.

The bottom line here is that, in our current system, what is private and what isn't, and who gets to makes those decisions becomes less and less a truly democratic process.

Saturday, May 23, 2015

The following post was prompted by a Guardian video on YouTube, which I found through Digg, and is linked below.

The crass, unapologetic, display of blatant usury shown here is just depressing as hell. You will know what I mean when the video gets to the 3:40 time mark.

The guy featured in this video is Frank Rolfe. He has set himself up, after making a lot of money running trailer parks for the poor, or legally out cast, as the dean of Mobile Home University; a $2K a seat training seminar on how anybody can do what he, and a bunch of other Billionaires, have done to those who, as Mr. Rolfe puts it (paraphrasing), are easy marks for rent hikes.

The following post was prompted by ThePointMag.com article linked below.

A symposium sponsored by n+1 ask the question "What is privacy for?" They then brought a group of panelists together to further respond to the question, as well as to respond to Jeremy Rifkin's contention that "...privacy is a capitalist value which we oughtto discard as the human race enters a new
'era of transparency'...”

The article is actually a condensed recitation of the remarks made by Ben Wizner, who is a lawyer.

Mr. Wizner's remarks are an articulate defense of privacy from the perspective of the idea that a just society cannot allow itself to fall into the trap of absolute application of laws; for which knowing what everybody is doing all of the time would be a prerequisite.

As such, in his view, cutting people some slack on breaking the rules is fundamentally necessary as there would be no social change otherwise, let alone any kind of creative, or loving, atmosphere for people to thrive on.

It's a persuasive argument. One that goes quite beyond the practical considerations of how absurd it would be from a simple standpoint of the resources it would consume to make such an authoritarian social order.

What really got me going, however, was Mr. Rifkin's remark about privacy and Capitalism.

There is little context for just how this notion was expressed, but on the face of it you really have to wonder. Why was no distinction made between citizen privacy, governmental privacy, and the privacy of owners of capital?

Certainly for Capitalists privacy is essential. Why else would we have patents (to secure the property aspect of a private process, and thus ensure its protected distribution), or commodities at all as property?

And lets not also forget that limited distribution is the essential aspect of the economics of scarcity. Without it there would be little, to no value at all for whatever thing or process you might wish to consider.

The problem with privacy and Capitalism comes in when you start talking about information and how that information is now both a commodity itself, as well as an essential aspect of how a society can proceed down the road of successful, as well as rewarding, existence.

It may be stating the obvious, but it still bears repeating: decisions cannot be made without the free flow of information. What we do when; the prioritization of competing critical necessities and, in fact, the very definitions of what critical is, or what rewarding is, or what success is.

As may also be obvious, if is from those decisions from which the distribution of responsibilities and benefits are determined.

So simple to summarize, but so contentious in practice when you have an operating model that allows for a few to accumulate huge concentrations of information (which is of course synonymous with money).

Citizen information in this context becomes a commodity that the commercial world deems their right to collect and utilize. And the government, ever more subservient to commercial concerns, sees it as their right to have as well in order to keep the kind of social cohesion in place that perpetuates the economics of scarcity.

I don't know what Rifkin was trying to express about privacy but I sure wish he was either quoted more accurately, or that he stated it a good deal more clearly.

Update:
The article linked below on medium.com by Danah Boyd provides a very interesting, contextual contrast, to the Ben Wizner above.
Here Ms. Boyd makes the quite relevant case for being concerned about who protects the privacy of the marginalized; especially, as in this case, when its young people, and more specifically students.

In that context her fears are that the law enforcement driven desire for more surveillance will reign supreme, furthering the predetermined supposition that the marginalized are not to be trusted. Another angle altogether on the creep of the absolutist authoritarian form of social order maintenance.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

The following post was prompted by the New York Magazine article linked below.

Machines that can do everything better than humans and yet these big names in science and industry do not question human skill remaining as a commodity; any more than to question the whole notion of production itself remaining a commercial commodity enterprise.

The fact of the matter is, at at least one aspect of its basis, AI throws the notion of the economics of scarcity into question. Maybe that's what scares some of the rich movers and shakers the most.

The following post was prompted by the Digg reader reprint, linked below, of a The Conversation article.

Building more of a needed thing that results, ultimately, in needing even more of it again, further down the road. Be it freeways, power, water, food, or whatever else.

And yet we remain with feet planted firmly on a planet that can only tolerate so much in the sense of flows of all of the things we depend on to keep us going. And no matter how clever we become with our engineering, those flows will inevitably hit absolute limits if we want the planet to remain habitable to even a limited set of biodiversity.

In this there needs to be a shift in perception as to just how critical a priority this needs to be. Even more than terrorists, or supposed enemy nations, or the continued pursuit of profit. This is the survival of our species, as well as anything even remotely resembling a viable, living planet.

Wake up. All of you. This train wreck waiting to happen is gathering speed. We are running out of time rapidly.

The following post was prompted by the New York Times article linked below.

Another bunch of banks pay billions in total fines and penalties for illegal activities. Should we feel comforted that the system of financial protections is working?

That no one would seem to be actually going to jail on this latest set of bad behavior, or that this comes on the heels of previous (in 2012) bad behavior ought to argue in the negative for such conclusions. You also have to wonder why, after paying what might seem a lot to us in fines, they always seem to return to working whatever angle they can to maximize profits.

When I wonder about this sort of thing I am always quite astonished at the lack of context we are provided with. Great emphasis is placed on big sounding numbers levied as fines, but you hardly ever hear exactly how much was actually stolen via the scheme. Seems to me that such extra information would be very helpful in determining just how much sting the penalties were actually dishing out. But that's just me.

Perhaps the reason they keep doing this is simply the fact that these are just quite naughty men and women who can't control themselves. Anything is possible after all, though I have to doubt any significant probability in that particular case.

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

The following post was prompted by the New York Times Magazine article linked below.

Either the futurists at Shell are really stupid, or their objectivity ought to be quite suspect. The fact of the matter is that sea based wind power, producing hydrogen, could grow at a much higher rate (than the article's Shell futurist suggests) if the will was there to make it happen.

Don't believe for one second that we couldn't move to a hydrogen based economy in very rapid order; especially if all of the usual concerns of Big Money were taken out of the equation. You know... Things like (to mention just a few) risk, established capital investments, and a lack of control over what is most essential in any commodity; that it never fall below a certain level of scarcity. You need only look at how diamonds are kept artificially scarce to see how this sort of things works.

One has to wonder just how much the people at Shell, be they futurists, or overseers, concern themselves with so called "Chaos" scenarios. After all, they are the ones that firmly established oil as a guaranteed scarce commodity. And you can be sure that they will be able to pass any of the costs of increased risks along to us.

Saturday, May 16, 2015

The miracle of life and the miracle of this planet are closely linked. That a ball of rock air and water would form in just the right band of habitability, and have a gas giant out where it could hoover up a good portion of possible impact objects, while still letting a few in to get a good mix of ingredients, is astonishing to say the least. And then to do that around a fairly young, and stable, star is astonishment to another order of magnitude altogether.

Relative stability and Billions of years of mix, shake, and energize so that the ultimate system of trial and error could work its magic to allow for living bio systems to come into being; giving way eventually to sentience. Entities that are not only self aware, but are able to consider meaning both in real time, as well as in the abstract of past and future. Beings that took grasp to the next level of "handle" and the naming of things that is at the heart of objectification.

All of this culminating in an ingrained sense of selfish materialism that refuses to let go of the economics of scarcity; the kind of fear based reasoning that lays at the heart of hording, concentration of control and the myth that being powerful will guarantee your grasp of that control.

As I have said before, ever more amounts of energy that can't dissipate into space means ever more frequent, and violent energy translations; more flows of convection, more fluctuations of pressure, more events of evaporation and condensation.

The seemingly constant drum beat of tornados in the mid West now is hardly even an a taste of what is yet to come, and yet we just get up every day, each and every one of us, and continue on with business as usual; even as we are moved by movies like Interstellar.

We are truly lemmings marching in lock step forward the precipice, using our gift of sentience for anything other than what it ought to be used for. Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting.

Friday, May 15, 2015

The following post was prompted by the Rolling stone article linked below.

The Trans Pacific-Partnership was written by, and for, those with the most to gain. Elizabeth Warren is quite correct in opposing it. President Obama is... Well, lets just say he's showing who's paying most of the campaign bills for the Democrats now.

If you believe in truly unfettered markets, as well as trickle down prosperity, than this is your baby. If you are an everyday working person, or an environmentalist, than you should be very worried.

Which is no more than to say that, in purely commercial terms, this would represent a big boost to overall trade numbers. The President is correct in that assertion. The problem is that you and I are not the ones who actually benefit directly from such increases. Jobs in some sectors might indeed increase, but the upshot is that wage competition from overseas manufacturing only gets worse. And, as the article points out, there is undoubtedly a lot of fine print that got buried in the secret negotiations that will allow Big Money to do the old "Gold Mine" con once again (you know... That's were they get the gold and you get the shaft); either in an environmental dodge as Warren suggests, and/or in other "stick it to us" clauses in everything else.

The real question here is why a Democrat would be pushing the usual predetermined situation framing that the Republicans do. The kind of thing where the questions is framed as "it's either this 'imperfect trade greaser' or bad job growth."

The beauty of this kind of preconditioning is that it works to take away any thought that the underlying assumptions are absurd in the first place.

If the economic model, and those few who really benefit from it, present choices that either screw you a bunch up front, or allow for a lot more screwing to occur incrementally over time, than its time to stop playing in an obviously rigged game. It's time to frame the situation as it actually affects you, and not how it absurdly benefits them. See this now or learn to love living on "Chump Change."

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

The following post was prompted by the Ars Technica article linked below.

Hold on to your hats because there is no doubt that "capitalized" labor, and the value/production priority system that goes with it, can stoop quite a bit lower before it finally implodes from the gravity of its massing contradictions.

Knowing where we are all of the time will go hand in hand with the chip implanted to finally identify you without ambiguity. This will then augment the final removal of hand held currency. Once that occurs their control will be complete. You won't be able to be off the grid no matter how much you may want to be.

The following post was prompted by the New Yorker article linked below.

It never ceases to amaze me how the depths of arrogance can plumb so deep as that of the the successful entrepreneur. One has to wonder how the ability to make money automatically equates with the idea of some kind of sage wisdom as to where, and how, humanity should proceed through time.

One could certainly understand that any such "capitalized" future would look quite enticing to the significant holder of said "capital." But as to its additional appeal to the rest of us a great deal of skepticism ought to be in place. After all, even if we assume an Elon Musk kind of altruism, a "capitalized" future is one subject to the insane vagaries of the market at the very least. Going down that path might be all well and good, as with commercial space development might seem now, but just wait till the next destabilizing event occurs. And lest there be any mistake, not only does an abused planet guarantee an ever increasing rate of such events, the electrically mutated economic model that makes "capitalizing" possible in the first place has its own new penchant for exactly the same effect. And that hardly even begins to suggest what will happen as the former interacts with the latter.

Live by the market, die by the market. If that's your idea of a bright future you are, in my humble opinion, an idiot.

The following post was prompted by the Aljazeera America article linked below.

As if it were really needed, what we see here is yet another indication that we are not right with ourselves. It is certainly complex, and not simply economic injustice, or the inequality of outcomes, but only a fool would think that these are not quite significant contributors.

The economics of scarcity, the inherent tendency of our current economic model to allow for the concentration of power, coupled with its inability to fairly prioritize value in a larger context of social cohesion and, most importantly, empathy and the ability to nurture, make the current economic model a hot house to incubate everything virulent and destructive.

I ask myself repeatedly how the intellectual elites of this nation can stand by and not denounce this cruel system once and for all for what it has become. And then to also take the next logical step of demanding that the nation as a whole begin the process of figuring out what the alternative should be, and how we go about putting it into place. The shame that should be in place here for the absence of this action is as stark as that for those who participate directly in these kinds of acts of horrific cruelty.

Saturday, May 9, 2015

The following post was prompted by the Pacific Standard article linked below.

The fallacy of sustainable seafood within a profit driven industrial model is aptly demonstrated in this article. What might not be so obvious, however, is that even with engineering taken, literally to new heights, by creating our own, controlled, food spheres off planet (or even some vast underground accommodations), the profit/risk mentality will prove disastrous.

Firstly, of course, is the fact that we have to admit to ourselves that industrialized food production of some sort is a given with population numbers that will start clicking over the tens of billions, sooner rather than later, unless truly horrific global collapse occurs. Continuing on with business as usual will, at a best case scenario, allow for a slow creep towards that final catastrophe. And the basis for this assertion is the simple fact that the profit/risk mind set has cutting corners embedded in its DNA; the combination of competition and the need for margin maximization makes this inevitable.

The fact of the matter is that you not only can't do industrialized food within a complex ecosystem that you wish to preserve on a much more fundamental level, you cannot do it on the scale of absolute critical control required by the demands of this kind of engineering; the shear size, low failure tolerance, and scope of effort required to get it started (investment without ordinary considerations of personal gain) make the current operating model absolutely inadequate to the task.

This is why I have been quite adamant in advocating social change integrated with several technological imperatives; namely the combination of a hydrogen fuel cycle, as well as a vastly more robust space program. Thus I have proposed sea based Tornado Wind turbines to be able to produce hydrogen on this kind of scale, and a mass driver launch system to enable the kind of tonnage throughput to make that scale of off planet operations feasible.

If you think this will happen, the way it ought to happen, if we continue playing the money game then you are truly not paying attention at all.

About Me

I am retired now, but I used to make my living as a Systems Analyst\Developer.

As my real passion has always been ideas, writing, reading, social change and music I am devoting myself to all of these. The primary focus, however is on social change.

It is my firm belief that Capitalism is obsolete. It has been rendered so because of electrified information systems. Not only do these make human skill as a commodity absurd, they also turn information into money, and money into information. At the very least, this reality makes representational Democracy virtually impossible because it can longer move freely. As a commodity it is necessarily subject to the net gain requirement in any exchange. As such information flow is seldom conducted for the benefit of the receiver.